If You Send Me Fire, I'll Send You Rain



I will get to the details of this swap soon but first I must tell you, that the rainy season has started here in Japan.  It started raining yesterday and with typhoons Chedeng and Songda headed towards the island, I’m thinking it isn’t going to stop raining any time soon.   

I’m not too thrilled about six or so straight weeks of rain, but I am excited about all the Japanese umbrellas!

Japanese umbrellas are traditionally made of rice paper, wooden spokes, and often have artsy designs printed on them…..like one you might imagine a Geisha would carry around. 

I LOVE LOVE LOVE, all the spokes…..don’t you?  Lucky for me, I found a more practical version of a Japanese umbrella in a local department store called Joyful Honda.  (No, this place doesn’t minimize my mourning for Target.)

Twenty-eight spokes. 

It is delightful and brightens any rainy day.  I love it.

So here’s the deal.  I need someone to send me 3 bottles of Cholula Hot Sauce.  Yeah, you heard me…….hot sauce.  I need it for my Salsa and Sweet-N-Spicy Garlic Dill Pickle recipes.  If you agree, I will send you an umbrella like mine. (Any color you want though.)  I’ll also send you some $$$ for the hot sauce.

Sure, I could have my mom send me some, but this is a lot more fun, don’t you think? 

All you have to do is comment on this post and I will randomly select a winner next Monday (June 6) from the thousands and thousands who will enter.  Or it could be like my first giveaway, and only four people will enter.  Surely I have become more famous in the past 6 months…don’t you think?

If not, Mom……could you please send me some Cholula Hot Sauce?

Update:

The winner of the umbrella is Ashley and she told me she’d send me some Cholula.  So Ashley, the umbrella is on the way and I am looking forward to adding extra spice to my life!

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Linking with Army Tankers Wife , Carrie With Children

Sweet-n-Spicy Garlic Dill Pickles

Sweet –n- Spicy is such a good combination, don’t you think?  My husband makes the coffee every night so all I have to do in the morning, when I am not the most pleasant person, is flip on the switch.  Awwwww…..he’s so sweet.  He also takes my CENSORED and he CENSORED it as he CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED me in bed.  Oooooh….SPICY!

Not only is he a sweet-n-spicy guy but he likes to eat sweet-n-spicy food.  For instance I might make him an egg sandwich for breakfast and he will put salt, pepper, grape jelly, and Tabasco sauce on it.  Don’t knock it until you try it.  I can say that because he force fed me once.  Anyway, he likes this pickle recipe and since there are three jars of it in the refrigerator he’ll probably put them on his egg sandwich this morning.

Sweet-n-Spicy Garlic Dill Pickles

 

·        One 16 ounce jar dill pickle slices

·        2 cups of sugar

·        ½ to 1 Tablespoon hot pepper sauce (I use Cholula)

·        5 pressed garlic cloves or 2 teaspoons chopped garlic

·        ¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes

Pour ALL of the ingredients in a bowl.  Usually, I make several jars at a time, like five for us and one to give away.  (I can eat a jar of these a day.)

Other recipes call for much less sugar, like just a half of cup.  This is bad.  Don’t make those.  Make mine.  Also, use Cholula hot sauce and not Tabasco sauce like other recipes say.  This is very bad also.  People will not like your pickles if you use Tabasco sauce.  Just make mine.

Where was I?  Oh yes, put all the ingredients in a bowl. (Save the pickle jars because you are going to use them later.) It is okay if you used the garlic from a jar.  Fresh is good, but there is so much sweet and spice going on you won’t be able to tell.  Just don’t use garlic powder....blech!

Now stir the mixture all together until the sugar is mostly dissolved.  Cover with plastic wrap and chill for 24 hours.  You may want to stir them occasionally if you think of it, but sometimes I forget and they still turn out fine.  Be sure you taste one if you stir it, so you can get an exciting sneak peek of flavor!

Next, take them out of the refrigerator and fill the jars with pickles.  Once the pickles hit right before the rims, pour in the juice.  For some reason I always have a few pickles that I can’t get back into the jars.  It is important that you leave some room for some juice though, so just eat those extra pickles yourself. 

Here’s a little FYI for you.  Re-jarring the pickles gets a kinda messy.  You will want to rinse the jars off after you put the lids back on.  Just in case you don’t know this, when you rinse things off they get wet.   When wet they can be slippery.  When you drop a slippery jar of pickles on your kitchen floor it will break and you will have a sticky, filled with glass shard, catastrophe on your hands.  I am not saying this happened to me, but it might have.

Your pickles are ready to store, eat, or give away after the lids are secured.  If you are going to give them away however, you might want to jazz them up.  It will make your friends feel special.  I decorated mine with a sort of fall harvest theme for Thanksgiving.  I know that I should have fancied up the lids also…..but there isn’t a Hobby Lobby within about 4000 miles of me.  Hope you like my pickles!

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